The 2020 anthology
For anyone who is a fan of work involving a modern-day plague, 2020 is the year at least part of it became real. The long incubation time during which the patient is already contagious, the respiratory symptoms and the not-completely-unheard-of dermatological symptoms of COVID-19 did little to shake off the feeling SSSS had correctly predicted a few things. With many fans stuck at home, the need to fill the void between chapter with fanworks was stronger and more organized than ever before. What follows is a contribution to various opportunities hosted on the official forum.
The first chapter break filler had two types of free-form works for each daily prompt: the "work of the day" that was guaranteed to be published and assigned to a creator in advance, and "other" works from people had simply managed to find both inspiration from the day's prompt and time to work on it. "The warmest welcome" is part of the second category, and written for the "Awakening" prompt. It pre-dates Onni's belly scratch session with Kitty in the comic proper, so I was still speculating on what the first bonding scene between Onni and Kitty might look like.
The warmest welcome
Onni was woken up by a giggle from Tuuri. The first thing he became aware of was that he had not fallen asleep with his right arm under his blanket, as something warm and heavy was now keeping it pinned to the ground right next to his bedroll. He briefly wondered what it could be before remembering he was no longer travelling alone and that his travel companions were extremely dedicated to making sure he didn't go off on his own a second time. Lalli in particular had been reluctant to leave his side. He was probably the one currently sleeping on his arm. Tuuri's voice responded to the thought with amusement:
-It isn't Lalli.
That explained the giggle from earlier. Onni was now reluctant to open his eyes. He couldn't think of an option that was not going to be embarrassing. However, he quickly realized that how carefully he was planning to get his arm out of under the other person depended on their identity, and looking at who it was would be the only way to know. He opened his eyes. It was the cat. Onni hadn't paid much attention to her aside from noticing her presence and her new collar. The cat hadn't seemed to pay much attention to Onni either. Yet, there she was, sleeping on his arm, something she wouldn't be doing if she didn't feel safe around him. His plans for getting his arm free hadn't taken her into account. He didn't have the heart to disturb her peaceful slumber anyway. He decided to catch a few more minutes of rest.
My "main work" for the chapter break filler was for the "Harvest" prompt. I almost picked another prompt before realizing I had enough theories about the retuning harvest party in the flashback from Adventure II to write a short story combining them. The ending of "Harvest's end" is partly based on a theory much older than those that were used for the rest of the story, as it's based on a single question asked by Reynir in Adventure I; it was quite pleasant to work it into a story after several years having it in mind.
Harvest's end
Tuuri had been "resting her eyes before reading that book" for half an hour now. Onni took the book and packed it; she could always read it the next day, when they would be back in Toivosaari. For now, the few members of the harvest party and even fewer permanent residents of the farming island who weren't exhausted by the last few days of work were having a small celebration. Tuuri hadn't wanted to participate, and Onni didn't dare leaving her alone after she had shown interest in sneaking out to one of the uninhabited islands. During a conversation over lunch, Hilja's daughter Hellä had admitted to being a lot like Tuuri when she was younger, and to have lost the impulse after reading a few books on the subject. She happened to have brought one of them to reread during the harvest, and had gladly made a temporary swap with one of the books Tuuri had brought over. Onni really hoped it would have the same effect on her as it had had on Hellä. Getting her interested in reading wouldn't be bad, either; if she liked books enough, she would be given a job that would keep her inside most of the time, maybe even one that would let her stay on Toivosaari during the harvest. That would be one less thing to worry about.
Onni went to the room's only window, from which he could see Toivosaari. Grandma and that little eye-poking critter Lalli were probably back from their fall scouting trip by now. Onni still couldn't believe Hilja, Illmari and Tapsa were going out there while not being immune. Their time had been a different one, during which immunity hadn't been discovered and couldn't be tested for. Once it had turned out that grandma was the only member of their scouting and hunting party to be immune, the only way to take the information into account without arbitrarily retiring three competent people from the job they'd been doing all their lives had been to make sure that Toivosaari's next generation of hunters and scouts would be immune. Onni briefly wondered what would have happened if Tuuri had grown up a time during which one didn't know if one was immune or not, and quickly realized it was a path he didn't want to travel.
Someone knocked on the door:
-Onni, are you in here?
He recognized his father's voice.
-Yes, come in.
Both of Onni's parents came in, sat on one of the room's unoccupied lower bunks, and invited Onni to join them. His mother was the first to speak:
-Your father and I have noticed how carefully you've been watching Tuuri over the week. You also showed us that you have gotten the hang of rowing a fully loaded boat on the way here.
His father continued:
-If you feel comfortable with it, we thought the two of us could get off the boat at the main dock tomorrow, and you could be the one to take Tuuri and the bags to the house.
Onni didn't have to think much before answering:
-I know I can do it. Thanks for trusting me.
He was sixteen. It was about time they treated him as an adult.
Just as he was thinking this, his parents got up from the bed, then invited him to come to the celebration and have a drink. But only one cup of something not too strong, he was going to be rowing alone the next day. Despite this, the alcohol messed with his mage senses a little; at some point, one of the faint troll voices he heard from the nearby islands sounded like it was coming from Toivosaari.
The prompt I almost chose for my chapter break filler "main work" was "Flowers". My mother was working from home during the first confinement, and had regular online sessions meant for socializing. As flower shops where closed, my mother and many of her work colleagues were missing having fresh flowers in their house. I thought that Árni from the prologue may have missed them during his quarantine, as well, making the titular "Bouquet" be one of the first things he would buy. And since fiction tends to consider flower selling a women's job, why not have the seller be his future wife Guðrún?
Bouquet
People just out of quarantine had become a consistent source of revenue for Guðrún's flower shop. Each time one of them stayed at the nearby hotel, they would buy flowers every day, for several days in a row, due to having greatly missed them during quarantine. Unfortunately, sooner or later, they all moved to a remote town on joined a party planning to build a brand new one from scratch. Saying she never saw any of them again would be a lie, as Reykjavik remained the only place where certain goods could be purchased. The people she recognized as former post-quarantine customers, however, never seemed to remember her. It was hence a pleasant surprise when Árni, a man who had babbled about becoming a sheepherder, came back to tell her he had moved into one of one of the "new towns", which was more of a hamlet by his own admission, and his new life project was well on its way. She had an even more pleasant surprise when he decided to buy a bunch of flowers from her "for old time's sake". She didn't know what to say when he presented the bouquet to her right after paying for it, asking if she was interested in sharing dinner. She managed to calm herself, and remember it was just dinner. They would both figure out if there was any kind of future for the two of them later. Nothing was more uncertain with the Rash slowly eating up the rest of the world, and the recent realization that even without the constant flow of foreign tourists, Iceland wasn't producing enough food to properly feed its own population.
For the following chapter break, the challenge was to make a work based on one of the comic's info pages and have readers guess which one. I picked the page about the cat academy, and expanded on my idea that Lalli go really into the potentially addictive cat treats after mistaking them for a kind of cookie. This is one of the few works for which I couldn't figure out a title I liked.
After more than a year of being part of this team that had been meant to stay together only for a few months, Mikkel had gotten used to the words "that's a new one" being an understatement, and that understatement being directed at someone else than him. His radio contact from the cat rehab center, however, was doing great for someone not used to their team's general weirdness:
-Well, this all the advice I can give you, short of bringing your teammate to the rehab center, which I don't think will help much in the present case.
-Thank you. I will get to it right away.
Mikkel liberated the radio room for the next person who needed it, and took advantage of the fact that his lunch break wasn't quite over yet to write up a rough estimate of the costs of the solution suggested by the woman from the cat rehab center. Hopefully, the people in charge of the money would have run into enough cases of cat treat addiction to realize that whatever the costs of taking care of the early stages were, they would only increase if they waited for things to get more serious to come up with the money. Fortunately, Mikkel's work for the afternoon had brought him to the office in which such things were submitted, and it was approved by the end of the day. It looked like enough people had the sufficient common sense to realize that cat treat addiction and a baseline of being uneasy around unfamiliar people couldn't mix well. He decided to go to Emil and Lalli's dorm room to show them the paper approving of the costs.
Emil looked at the paper, wide-eyed:
-So, we're going to gradually replace the cat treats with mini-cupcakes… paid by the military.
-Yes.
Lalli, meanwhile, was reading over Emil's shoulder, chewing on yet another cat treat, the next one already in his hand.
In his own room, Onni decided to finally try those fish-shape mini-biscuits that Lalli liked so much. He was right, those things tasted quite good.
Inktober, a "one ink drawing a day" challenge happening over the month of October, was something I would notice but not participate in because it takes me forever to make even the simplest drawings. However, 2020 was also the year of a couple scandals for the challenge's creator, resulting in various corners of the Internet making their own version of the challenge. The SSSS fandom's version was dubbed Yoinktober and did away with the part where the work had to be an ink drawing. By coincidence, it overlapped with very short break between two of the comic's chapters. "Silent Child", my story covering Adventure I in which a little girl is found in the old school instead of a cat, was finished by then. This, combined with my soft spot for cat ear hats, made my brain go to an oddly specific place when I saw the "Cat hat" prompt, resulting in "A second pair of ears".
A second pair of ears
Many neighbors had heard of the little girl the expedition had found in the Silent World, and come to drop off some hand-me-downs. As Sigriður had offered to watch the little girl while her guardians went out to have a walk together, she ended up receiving them. Soon enough, there were so many clothes there was no way they would all fit in the travel bags they had, and Sigriður decided to have the little girl try them on to discard those that were already too small or so big she would take a while to grow into them. Summer clothes would need to fit her, winter clothes had more leeway. After sorting most of the clothes, she noticed that there were several scarves, winter hats, and pairs of mittens. The girl was going to only really need one of each. For the hat, there was an immediate consensus on the work of a particularly creative neighbor who had eventually needed to give in and make a bigger, identical one for her ever-growing child.
xxxx
Lalli stopped just short of spitting out his warm milk when he saw what the little girl was wearing, and Emil actually did. Leave it to him to need to change clothes twice in one day, the first change being due to both of them getting rained on right after going up the mountain to enjoy the view. It took Lalli a while to process the fact that the little girl was wearing a wool hat almost the same color as her hair, long enough to cover her actual ears and decorated with surprisingly realistic fake cat ears. Iceland sure was a weird country.
This year, I also participated in the official forum's advent calendar. In "Silent Child", Kitty's human counterpart Katja is a mage whose magic is provided by the Abrahamic god, implicitly destined to give second chance to that magic tradition in the future. Due to that decision coming late into the writing, she also has feline animal companion in the dreamspace. "Katja's birthday" is half an excuse to have a Katja-centered "token child of the team gets presents from everyone on their birthday and/or Christmas" plot, half a "why not?" moment concerning her birthday and the extent to which the members of the team most attached to her would have noticed its significance. The ending is a continuation of a scene from "Silent Child", in which Tuuri mistakes little Katja for being interested in mechanics that happened after the former was bitten, which her death turned into a standalone scene.
Katja's birthday
According to the ledgers left behind by her parents, Katja's birthday was just a few days after Jul. She made the cut for her birthday to be celebrated during the festival itself. Due to the circumstances in which she had grown up and her tendency to follow them to places she shouldn't, this was going to be Katja's first proper festival. The day before the festival, Sigrun asked him a question that she somehow hadn't considered before despite the fact that they had both been Katja's parents for close to a year:
-Hey, Mikkel, you know stuff, so maybe to can solve a mystery for me. Do you have any idea why children born up to six days after Jul get to be "Jul children", but the acceptable "before" date is about half that?
-This one is actually quite easy. Old-world astronomers estimated that the actual solstice could be up to a couple days before the usual celebration. As for the "after" cut-off, I assume you remember that place where we got rid of the ghosts, according to Reynir. That religion had a widespread festival that took place the 25th of December, and sometimes required to have the following day to be taken off, as well. In many places, it got either combined with or outright replaced winter solstice celebrations. According to archives, when Jul became the sole winter solstice festival again and was moved up a few days, people in charge decided that the transition would be eased if people who had been used to the Old World festival also being their birthday party were allowed to celebrate it during Jul.
-25th of December, eh? How did that god not have this happen on purpose?
Both Sigrun and Reynir were insistent that Katja was meant to have a role in regards to that religion as it was. If neither of them asked about it specifically or found out on their own, Mikkel was going to keep what the 25th of December festival was meant celebrate from them for as long as his could. Even if they were right, something that he was doubting less and less, having a guardian who didn't make as much of a big deal of it as everyone else around her may make a great difference for the sort of childhood Katja would end up having. His thoughts were interrupted by a knock on the door. It turned out be the mailman:
-A couple packages for you just came out of quarantine. There is another that will be out by tomorrow's mail delivery, as well.
xxxx
One of the packages was from Reynir. He was sending over copies of all the books about that religion he could find in Iceland, and had gotten his hand on the latest one close enough to Jul to send it along with the small stuffed sheep that was his actual gift. If books on the subject produced in Denmark and Sweden had a "gods don't actually exist anyway, but they make an interesting study subject" bias to them, the bias of those from Iceland could be summed up as "that god does exist, but it's in everyone's best interest to not worship them". However, considering how thorough Iceland's efforts to ban that god's worship had been during the first few decades after the initial Rash outbreak, any surviving information was good to have. Besides, if any of the things denounced in those books were true, they would be clearly stated and explained mistakes from the past that Katja would later know to avoid if her supposed part in rebuilding that religion from the ground up ever came to be. The toy, meanwhile, was identical to one Katja had played with during her stay in Iceland, hadn't been allowed to take with her upon leaving for various reasons, but hadn't been reluctant enough to part with to change anyone's mind. Emil had sent a small bag of expensive sweets that a bakery in Mora had started to produce within the last few months, and that were much appreciated by his younger cousins. A second item was found in the package from Emil: a cat figurine that had been sculpted in the most light-colored wood that one could find, painted with markings the same color as Katja's hair. Its style was promptly recognized. It was very like those two to announce such news by sending presents together out of the blue. On Jul itself, a package from Finland was delivered. If Lalli's present was accompanying Emil's, that left only one person who knew Katja who could have sent it. The present itself, however, was something someone else entirely would have chosen: a "mechanics for beginners" book.